Perfect Pitch Is Not Magic

As I touched on in the first post on this subject, there are a wide variety of ideas about how absolute pitch works. Why do some people ‘just have it’? If you’re not born with it, how can you develop it? Why do some people hear real differences in a C and a D, and others not?

In this post I want to discuss some of the ideas around how absolute pitch works, and highlight what I thought was particularly promising in the forum post on absolute pitch training I mentioned before.

Conflicting theories

If you look at training courses for absolute (or “perfect”) pitch, you’ll find a lot of conflicting explanations of what makes the ear hear different pitches differently. Anything from the relative strength of the harmonics, to timbral clues (like the start and end of notes), to an inexplicable ‘character’ that you must try to hear through very deep listening.

My educational background is scientific and I’m a big fan of Occam’s Razor – so it’s probably no surprise that I tend to subscribe to the more basic explanation, one grounded in fundamental science: Click to read the rest…